Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) Review
The gang of thieves in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958): Italian-style incompetence
Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti, 1958) is likely one of the greatest capers in film history for it is the comic undoing of the genre. Here we have a classic post-war Italian film. Poor folk, poor town (which happens to be Rome). We have a bunch of fellows who wouldn’t have a penny to offer their undertakers: they’d have to beg for their caskets. Low-lifes, ne’er-do-wells seeking an easy way out, but lacking talent – any minimal talent – to achieve that. They’re absolutely incompetent, unprepared, and hapless. They just can’t do anything right.
Who are they? A hungry, impoverished old man (Carlo Pisacane) – a hobo really, inspiring pity; a third-rate pugilist (Vittorio Gassman), full of panache, but a loafer and a buffoon, and, above all, a loser; a sexist, ridiculously old-fashioned Sicilian (Tiberio Murgia), who keeps his sister (the young Claudia Cardinale) under house-arrest until she marries; a young and poor (they’re all terribly poor) robber of baby strollers (Renato Salvatori); and, finally, Marcello Mastroianni as a petty street thief turned househusband, taking care of a crying baby who does not eat enough, while his tough wife is in jail. This is the finest crew for a job ever put together on film.
The job: a vault in an apartment at Vie delle Madonna (Madonna Street) – commedia all’italiana at its best. Nothing’s serious from start to finish in this Odyssey of bums: frustrated robberies, cheap seductions, theatrical fights, disastrous decisions and, to crown the magnificent stupidity of it all, an epic final heist. The amateur robbers destroy the apartment’s plumbing, perforate the wrong wall, lose time, ruin everything, and, finally, raid the refrigerator…
Then they eat pasta and give up on the whole thing. A heist is easier in films. After the heroic crew disperses, Gassman’s character, running from the police, happens to end up in a factory: and they’re hiring! What’s a bum to do to make a buck after all? If he can’t steal, he better work… That’s the film’s tragedy: Gassman’s desperate look when he realizes he’ll be dragged to a factory line, to an honest back-breaking job, since he's not competent to do anything else.
The headlines read in the film’s final shot: “unknown thieves break into apartment to steal pasta and chickpeas”. – The final scorn. Big Deal in Madonna Street derides of the “scientific” caper, those films where everything is well planned and thought out before, and then executed masterfully by tough and ingenious professionals (for instance, Jules Dassin’s Rififi). Here, on the contrary, we have cinema’s greatest amateur hour: nothing, absolutely nothing works as the robbers are a bunch of inept paupers trying to make ends meet without working in post-war Italy. And Piero Umiliani’s jazzy score captures the spirit of this Dunciad of buffoonery and incompetence: a majestically Italian mess.
